walterra

• Comic Book Narrative Charts inspired by xkcd and Minard
  
  Note to self: Find the time to revisit narrative twitter visualizations.
• Stephen lists recent Interface design trends.
• I enjoyed watching the Erlang Movies! If you can’t make it through the first, definitely watch the sequel, it’s funny. Actually I watched them a day before WhatsApp got acquired and found out that it’s built using Erlang, I swear!
  
  

• Reading of the week: The Failures of „Intro to TDD“. Especially for developing and testing interfaces, IMHO good TDD is still a real challenge. The article is definitely a good read.
• Facebook’s Origami cries for further investigation. Based on Quartz Composer it aims to be your UX design tool of choice. They used it for their new Paper app.
• youmightnotneedjquery.com — nice reference if you’re developing library stuff where you should think twice about bringing in fat dependencies.
• Twitter did a nice job visualizing the State of the Union adress
• Twitter again, see hogan.js, a compiler for Mustache templates!
• earth.nullschool.net is great in so many ways (design, technology etc.)! There’s only one point I see which might be a little bit problematic: I’m not sure if I even get it right, but as far as I understand it (without deeply investigating the underpinnings), it seems, the visualization is representing a certain point of time, but is still animating it (mapping speed vectors to lines we perceive as moving). I’m afraid this could lead to a bit of irritation or misunderstanding in perception or interpretation. What do you think? — BTW be sure to try out ocean mode, so great! Update #1: Seems the data doesn’t consist of single vectors but indeed multiple timely spaced records. Update #2: Feedback from @cambecc:

@walterra Right, it’s an animated snapshot in time. Particles trace field lines, not the path the wind takes as the system evolves over time

— Cameron Beccario (@cambecc) February 4, 2014

Last week I started a sort of weekly curated links’n’thoughts series. Here we go again.

Continued to investigate vert.x, but still had no time to give it a go myself. Here’s a nice stackoverflow thread including vert.x and similar projects. Offers three answers with the original developers of each framework in discussion kicking in. stackoverflow is so good and so bad in so many ways (see ‚closed as primarily opinion-based‘ in the thread).

More things worth mentioning:

• gitlab.com offers free private repositories (including gitlab’s nice interface of course)
• The Tether positioning engine and related tools, including Shepherd, looks like a great framework to create inline tutorials and how-tos
• Not really encountered this week, but gotta mention it here: Since a few years I use Freckle, my time tracking tool of choice. Not only a great tool, but a great little company behind it worth supporting.
• Can’t wait for the ElasticSearch v1.0 release, here’s a good roundup of upcoming awesome stuff.

Hari Om Tat Sat.